An enchanting cine odyssey into ensemble eclectic contemporary European cinemas
Marking a stupendous conduct and successful conclusion of its 59th edition, Karlovy Vary International Film aka KVIFF, which will step into its 60th edition Circa 2026, to be held from July 3 to July 11, 2026. is one of oldest in the world and leading film congregation in Central and Eastern Europe.Unlike much hyped attended Cannes Film Festival, which showcases cinema from all world over, and precedes Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which describes itself as non-specialised film festival, the primary focus at KVIFF is on showcasing films from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and North Africa. The prestigious annual calendar cinema carnival provides a common and ubiquitous platform for discovering and promoting independent cinema from these regions. The core focus being laying a strong emphasis on cinemas culled and curated from countries such as Czech Republic, in whose principal Spa town it is held, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, among others.
Besides, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival also provides a perspective and world window to the films from the Balkan regions, the former South Union, the Middle East as also North Africa, in large and focus manner.Of course, given it is international film festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival, also showcases representative contemporary cinemas from across world under Horizons Section with selection of most remarkable contemporary films, with festival’s industry section entitled KVIFF Eastern Promises, specifically connecting filmmakers from the aforementioned regions with international industry professionals.
The largest film festival in Czech Republic and the most prestigious in Central and Eastern European region, it shares its prominence and prestige with similar film festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, San Sebastian, Montreal, Shanghai, and Tokyo.The 59th edition, which drew curtains on the nine-day gala feting and feasting some of choicest and carefully curated cinemas by festival programmers led by principal architect – Artistic Director Karel Och and team comprising Anna Korinek Programme Coordinator, Lorenzo Esposito Associate Programmer, programmers Sandra Hezinová, Petra Vočadlova, Vojtech Kocarnik, Natalia Kozakova, international consultants Martin Horyna, Joseph Fahim, Arnaud Gourmelen and Hossein Eidizadeh, was attended by 9,949 accredited visitors.
Of them 7,926 being festival passes holders, 411 filmmakers, 1,055 accredited film professionals, and 557 journalists. The festival saw a total of 465 film screenings with a total of 128 133 tickets being sold during the course of its nine-day run. A total of 175 films were screened, including 108 feature fiction films, 23 feature documentaries and 44 short films.A total of 1055 film producers, film buyers, film sellers, distributors, film festival programmers, representatives of film institutions, and other film professionals were accredited, while 494 accredited film professionals came to the festival from abroad. A total of 40 films and projects in development or production across five platforms being showcased before a total of 103 buyers and distributors and 115 film festival programmers.
The film festival which saw 12 films in the main prize competition – Crystal Globe – featuring films from Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Iran, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Spain, Turnkey, and the USA, saw Czech & Slovak Republic’s comedic social environmental documentary Better Go Mad in the Wild by Miro Remo pouch the coveted Grand Pix Award (US$25,000).
According to five-member Jury comprising Nicolas Celis, Babak Jalali, Jessica Kiang, Jiří Mádl and Tuva Novotny, the film “is a funny valentine to the fading art of being true to yourself, Miro Remo’s delightfully inventive documentary is a portrait of bickering twin brothers who may live a weird, off-grid life on their dilapidated farm but who, in a world as mad as ours, actually might be the sanest people on earth. In the lifestyle it portrays but also in the filmmaking risks it takes and the raucously loving brotherhood it admires, Better Go Mad in the Wild feels like a gulp of fresh, woody air, or a quick dip in an outdoor pond, or a moment of contemplation as a cow chews on your beard. In short, it feels like being free.”
The Special Jury Prize comprising US$15,000 picked by Iranian film Bidad by Soheil Beiraghi. The jury praising it for “mirroring the bravery it takes to make such a film in Iran, writer-director Soheil Beiraghi’s Bidad is just as courageous in its constantly unexpected narrative turns, as it careens through different genre terrains as energetically as it rolls through the different suburbs of Tehran. Morphing from social-injustice thriller into family melodrama into a triumph over adversity arc, it is most striking as a gonzo lovers-on-the-run romance, shot through with punk energy and spiky personality that ends on an ambivalent yet optimistic note — because where there’s this much life, there’s hope.”
The Best Director Award in the said competition going to Lithuanian director Vytautas Katkus for The Visitor and French director Nathan Ambrosioni for Out of Love.
According to the Jury “by awarding two films that represent opposite ends of the spectrum in approach yet are each, individually, deeply impressive directorial statements, we deliver our ex-aequo Best Director decision as gesture of a faith in cinema’s diversity: There are so many ways to be a great director. Nathan Ambrosioni demonstrates a maturity, compassion and polish far beyond his years in the moving and beautifully crafted Out of Love in which a rich yet understated presentation that allows the terrific all-ages acting ensemble to deliver intensely felt, empathetic performances. In his feature debut, Vytautus Katkus truly exploits the creative freedom that a director perhaps only ever properly enjoys with their first film, displaying an uncompromised, idiosyncratic vision that is both dazzlingly precise in its detail and dreamily peculiar as whole.”
In Proxima Competition, the four member Jury Yulia Evina Bhara, Noaz Deshe, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias and Marissa Frobes picked Bangladesh film Sand City by Mahde Hasan for Grand Prix carrying prize money of US$15,000.In picking their winner the Jury appreciatively observed that “a realm unknown, where architecture breathes and silence screams. Time drips sideways in this fractured hourglass, and color spills like memory. In Sand City, cinema becomes a trembling map of the strange, abandoned, and intimate at the edge of sense.”
The Proxima Special Jury Prize comprising US$10, 00 went to Federico Atehortua Arte4aga’s Foresincs with the Jury nothing “for years, streaming giants have commodified Latin American stories of violence and have transformed them into consumable drama. Colombia and Mexico have become epicenters in a cynical economy built on pain, death, and disappearance. That’s why we honour cinema that resists—small, imperfect, but brave. Films that decolonise the gaze and propose new paradigms, because the old ones justify colonial narratives and systems of exclusion, whose consequences are bodies silenced, erased, and disappeared into the void of war—never to return. This award goes to a film that carries forward the tradition of swimming against the current of globalized violence—with truth, with ethics, and above all, with poetry.”
Manoel Dupont’s Before/After won Jury Special Mention which stated “sometimes a film comes along that surprises you—not with spectacle, but with honesty. Before / After is one of those rare stories: simple, odd, and deeply human. What begins the dream of a hair transplant in Turkey becomes a tender road movie and a fleeting love story without labels. We celebrate its warmth, its humility with a voice that makes us laugh and feel.”
Incidentally, International Federation of Film Critics Jury which awards two FIPRESCI Prizes – Crystal Globe Competition and Proxima Competition, for works that best promote film art and encourage new and young cinema, chose Out of Love by Nathan Ambrosioni stating “the 25-year-old writer-director shows his remarkable skill in working not only with adult actors but with children in examining fragile family relationships.”
Likewise, FIPRESCI jury picked Before/After by Belgium’s Manoel Dupont as best film in Proxima Competition, “for its unfeigned exploration of a relationship as fractured and ambiguous as the cinematic travelogue that captures it. Through its hybrid aesthetics, the filmmaker grants the narrative an openness to question how the real interferes with fiction, and to prod the notion of character in cinema as knowable. The film depicts the homoerotic bond with humour and tenderness, while also placing its Western protagonists in the context of orientalism and socioeconomic privilege.”
For this critic, who watched around 40 plus films overall, among Crystal Globe Competition films that impressed were Iranian film Bidad by Soheil Beiraghi, which despite centering around proverbial theme of women facing repression in Iranian regime, the boldness and novelty Soheil brings into his social drama is what makes it so different from ones already seen.
The Turkish beauty Cinema Jazireh by Gozde Kural which also centres round a woman bracing her constrictive society as she set upon in search of her missing young son. The duplicity of the dogmatic State that imposes severe curbs on women’s conduct in public is searing probed and exposed.
The three hour long epic and expansive Spanish film When A River Becomes The Sea by Pere Vila Barcelo turns out a tough but socially provocative watch wherein a young college going girl faces the ultimate trauma any women faces and how she tries to reconcile to the horrendous situation with a kindly and patient baker father and a history/architect teacher stand as her supporting pillars in her singular fight in overcoming her psychological and physical defilement.
Another emotional and evocative film Rebuilding by American director Max-Walker Silverman wherein a grieving ranch owner has to come to terms with the devastation of his vast farmland by forest fire and how his spirited young daughter becomes the catalyst in his journey after a slow bonding and how he becomes the benevolent benefactor of others similarly dispossessed and uprooted from their natural moorings.
From Proxima Competition Peruvian film The Anatomy of the Horses by Daniel Vidal Toche provides a perspective, probing surreal and captivating study into the struggle, exploitation and oppression Peruvians face and the revolution they aspire for to fight it.
Thus Spoke the Wind Armenian gripping and haunting metaphysical crime thriller feature by Maria Rigel about the coming of age of an introverted boy in a remote village being witness to the violence being bullied all around him and how the arrival of his absentee mother upsets the applecart where his caring aunt runs a business farm.
Then you have the winner Sand City, by Bangladesh’s Mahde Hasan a stark and soulful study as two disparate individuals – a man and a woman – try to come to terms with isolation, loneliness and dreary drudgery of their lives in the suffocating City through the motif of real estate and sand theft in an elegiac ode to a city that is bursting at its seams.
In Special Screenings Section Caravan by Czech-Slovak Republic’s Zuzana Kirchnerova draws one into its moving and maudlin portrayal of how a mother tends to her mentally challenged boy sacrificing all her own personal and physical needs as they embark upon a road trip to keep him calm from her sudden violent bursts.
A Second Life by France’s Laurent Slama is sheer joi de vivre and cool as cucumber film that takes one on a Parisian sojourn hosting the Olympics Games while an hearing impaired Airbnb broker crisscrosses racing against time to meet her client’s demands even as a footloose carefree zestful youth hitches on to her turning a Rainmaker in her otherwise busy as a bee demanding career ridden life.
Horizons had Irish-UK fare Christy by Brendan Canty a meaningful social drama spotlighting on the cusp of adulthood boy who thrown out of shelter home is accommodated by his brother as he reconciles to what he has to do in life and curb his volatile disposition.
The other films in the section The Sound Of Falling by Germany’s Mascha Schilinski tracking the lives of four generations of women and gripping courtroom drama Belgium’s We Believe You by director-duo of Charlotte Devillers and Arnaud Dufeys of how a mother fights to retain the custody of her two badly bruised and traumatised children by their despotic father having walked out of her domestic violent home.
Among the marquee auteur names that featured in the section included South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo with his delectable What Does That Nature Say To You a probing parodical romantic social drama of class and status, the musical, Western type, high adrenaline roadie thriller Sirat with scintillating cinematography and high drama from Spain’s Oliver Laxe, and Jafar Panahi’s Cannes cinematic crown jewel – the Palm d’or winner It Was Just An Accident.
With hot springs, splendorous spas, Thai massage parlours, the sylvan, serene surroundings, the scenic parks and tourists spots, lending an ethereal Shangri-La setting surrounding the high profile annual film festival as renowned, invited iconic stars were ushered in for felicitations with festival’s highest honours, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, lived true to its billing as one among the must do itinerary films festivals circuit for the itinerant cinephile with his undying yen to soak in the crème la crème of contemporary cinemas.
Truly, returning to Karlovy Vary International Film Festival was like attaining Nirvana as the serenity, the quietude and the becalming weather and surroundings, the intermittent drizzles, the cool breeze wafting across, the potpourri of performances, the wholesomely welcoming citizens and cine family, making engagement with the cinemas that much enriching and ennobling making one want to do an encore come 2026.
Until July next then, au revoir, adios KVIFF, till we assemble again, to celebrate another year of cinemas and the talented movie makers for yet another sheer déjà vu moment. As one would say in Czech: Ať žije Mezinárodní filmový festival v Karlových Varech. Na shledanou v roce 2026. Do té doby Adios! mon amigo. (Long live Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Meet you again in 2026. Until then Adios! mon amigo.)